if you could truly impartially reason through it, run experiments, etc, the correct answer is either not that hard to figure out, or that we’re pretty sure we can’t know one way or the other.
What’s the alternative? That finding the correct answer is tractable but hard in the way that major scientific progress is?
the alternative is that it must be hard or impossible to know the truth on an issue anytime where there is the appearance of a vaguely balanced public debate among smart people. for example, if you believed the alternative deeply, you might say “well, a bunch of smart people think that AI uses a lot of water, and a bunch of other smart people think that AI doesn’t use a lot of water. while the argument that AI water use isn’t a big deal makes a lot of sense to me, clearly the people who think it does use a lot of water are equally convinced of their position, so who really knows who’s right”
Some kind of miscommunication has happened. I thought the claim in the OP was that most topics fall in bin A “easy to figure out” OR bin B “probably unknowable”, which seemed like a trivial claim to me because the only alternative is bin C “tractable but hard”. But now it seems like you’re arguing most topics fall in bin A?
What’s the alternative? That finding the correct answer is tractable but hard in the way that major scientific progress is?
the alternative is that it must be hard or impossible to know the truth on an issue anytime where there is the appearance of a vaguely balanced public debate among smart people. for example, if you believed the alternative deeply, you might say “well, a bunch of smart people think that AI uses a lot of water, and a bunch of other smart people think that AI doesn’t use a lot of water. while the argument that AI water use isn’t a big deal makes a lot of sense to me, clearly the people who think it does use a lot of water are equally convinced of their position, so who really knows who’s right”
But then wouldn’t we be “pretty sure we can’t know one way or the other”?
no, because sometimes we can know pretty sure one way or the other, and so if you were sure you can’t know, you’d be wrong
Some kind of miscommunication has happened. I thought the claim in the OP was that most topics fall in bin A “easy to figure out” OR bin B “probably unknowable”, which seemed like a trivial claim to me because the only alternative is bin C “tractable but hard”. But now it seems like you’re arguing most topics fall in bin A?